In the quest to realize analog signal processing using sub-wavelength metasurfaces, in this paper, we demonstrate the first experimental demonstration of programmable time-modulated metasurface processors based on the key properties of spatial Fourier transformation. Exploiting space-time coding strategy enables local, independent, and real-time engineering of not only amplitude but also phase profile of the contributing reflective digital meta-atoms at both central and harmonic frequencies. Several illustrative examples are demonstrated to show that the proposed multifunctional calculus metasurface is capable of implementing a large class of useful mathematical operators, including 1st- and 2nd-order spatial differentiation, 1st-order spatial integration, and integro-differential equation solving accompanied by frequency conversions. Unlike the recent proposals, the designed time-modulated signal processor effectively operates for input signals containing wide spatial frequency bandwidths with an acceptable gain level. Proof-of-principle simulations are also reported along with the successful realization of image processing functions like edge detection. This time-varying wave-based computing system can set the direction for future developments of programmable metasurfaces with highly promising applications in ultrafast equation solving, real-time and continuous signal processing, and imaging.
We numerically demonstrate two types of metasurface absorbers to efficiently absorb digital signals. First, we show that the digital waveforms used in this study contain not only a fundamental wave but also nonnegligible harmonic waves, which limits the absorption performance of a conventional metasurface absorber operating in only a single, finite frequency band. The first type of the proposed absorbers is designed using two kinds of unit cells, each of which absorbs either a fundamental frequency or third harmonic of an incident digital waveform. This dual-band metasurface absorber exhibits …
Beyond the scope of space-coding metasurfaces, space-time digital metasurfaces can substantially expand the application scope of digital metamaterials in which simultaneous manipulation of electromagnetic waves in both space and frequency domains would be feasible. In this paper, by adopting a superposition operation of terms with unequal coefficient, Huygens principle, and a proper time-varying biasing mechanism, some useful closed-form formulas in the class of large digital metasurfaces were presented for predicting the absolute directivity of scatted beams. Moreover, in the harmonic beam st…
Over the last couple of years, the digital coding acoustic metasurfaces have been developed rapidly as a highly active research area for their unique and flexible manipulation of acoustic wavefronts. Nevertheless, all recent attentions in the acoustic community have been mainly concentrated on space-encoded architectures, leaving the room free for benefiting from the unique features of spatiotemporally modulated metasurfaces. By entering the world of time, here, we propose a space-time-coding acoustic digital metasurface with exotic ability to dynamically transfer the energy of the carrier aco…
Exploiting of nonlinearity has opened doors into undiscovered areas for achieving multiplexed performances in recent years. Although efforts have been made to obtain diverse nonlinear architectures at visible frequencies, the room is still free for incorporating non-linearity into the design of microwave metasurfaces. In this paper, a passive dual-band power intensity-dependent metasurface is presented. Here, power-multiplexing performance is achieved by embedding PIN-diodes in the coding particles. The proposed digital metasurface has three operational states: 1) it acts as a normal reflector…
Programmable metasurfaces incorporated with tunable materials controlled by external stimuli can provide an unprecedented degree of freedom in dynamical wave manipulation in real-time. Beyond the scope of isotropic reconfigurable metasurfaces that only support unique tunable responses for excitation with a certain single-polarization, here, for the first time a new generation of ultrafast reprogrammable multi-functional anisotropic metasurface is reported to enable interchangeable missions independently for two orthogonal linearly polarized THz wavefront excitations. The reconfigurability of t…
Light projection displays play an increasingly important role in our modern life. Core projection systems including liquid crystal displays and digital micromirror devices can impose spatial light modulation and actively shape light waves. Recently, the advent of metasurfaces has revolutionized design concepts in nanophotonics, enabling a new family of optical elements with exceptional degrees of freedom. Here, we demonstrate a light projection display technology based on optical metasurfaces, called digital metasurface device (DMSD). Each metasurface pixel in a DMSD is electrically reconfigur…
Metasurfaces, the two-dimensional counterpart of metamaterials, have caught great attention thanks to their powerful capabilities on manipulation of electromagnetic waves. Recent times have seen the emergence of a variety of metasurfaces exhibiting not only countless functionalities, but also a reconfigurable response. Additionally, digital or coding metasurfaces have revolutionized the field by describing the device as a matrix of discrete building block states, thus drawing clear parallelisms with information theory and opening new ways to model, compose, and (re)program advanced metasurface…
The recently proposed extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) beams with time-varying orbital angular momentum (OAM) realized by high-harmonic generation (HHG) provides extraordinary tools for quantum excitation control and particle manipulation. However, such an approach is not easily scalable to other frequency regimes. Here, we design a space-time-coding digital metasurface operating in microwave frequencies to experimentally generate different modes of time-varying OAM. We also introduce a concept of superhelicity of time-varying OAM with a higher-order twist of the wavefront structure, which can be fur…
Space-time modulated metasurfaces have attracted significant attention due to the additional degree of freedom in manipulating the electromagnetic (EM) waves in both space and time domains. However, the existing techniques have limited wave control capabilities, leading to just a few feasible schemes like regulation of only one specific harmonic. Here, we propose to realize independent manipulations of arbitrarily dual harmonics and their wave behaviors using a space-time-coding (STC) digital metasurface. By employing different STC sequences to the reflection phase of the metasurface, independ…
Modern wireless communication is one of the most important information technologies, but its system architecture has been unchanged for many years. Here, we propose a much simpler architecture for wireless communication systems based on metasurface. We firstly propose a time-domain digital coding metasurface to reach a simple but efficient method to manipulate spectral distributions of harmonics. Under dynamic modulations of phases on surface reflectivity, we could achieve accurate controls to different harmonics in a programmable way to reach many unusual functions like frequency cloaking and…
Monitoring and controlling the state of polarization of electromagnetic waves is of significant interest for various basic and practical applications such as linear position sensing and medical imaging. Here, we propose the first conformal digital metamaterial absorber to detect the polarization state of THz incident waves. The proposed polarimeter is capable of characterizing four independent polarization states of (TE, TM, $\pm {45^\circ}$ linear, and RCP/LCP) by observing the reflectivity of the structure with respect to the x- and y-direction. Besides, the proposed structure displays a str…
Recently, the investigation of metasurface has been extended to wave control through exploiting nonlinearity. Among all of the ways to achieve tunable metasurfaces with multiplexed performances, nonlinearity is one of the promising choices. Although several proposals have been reported to obtain nonlinear architectures at visible frequencies, the area of incorporating nonlinearity in form of passive-designing at microwave metasurfaces is open for investigation. In this paper, a passive wideband nonlinear metasurface is manifested, which is composed of embedded L-shape and Γ-shape meta-atoms wi…
Optical wave-based computing has enabled the realization of real-time information processing in both space and time domains. In the past few years, analog computing has experienced rapid development but mostly for a single function. Motivated by parallel space-time computing and miniaturization, we show that reconfigurable graphene-based metasurfaces offer a promising path towards spatiotemporal computing with integrated functionalities by properly engineering both spatial- and temporal-frequency responses. This paper employs a tunable graphene-based metasurface to enable analog signal and ima…
Analog computing has emerged as a promising candidate for real-time and parallel continuous data processing. This paper presents a reciprocal way for realizing asymmetric optical transfer functions (OTFs) in the reflection side of the on-axis processing channels. It is rigorously demonstrated that the presence of Cross-polarization Exciting Normal Polarizabilities (CPENP) of a reciprocal metasurface circumvents the famous challenge of Green's function approach in implementation of on-axis reflective optical signal processing while providing dual computing channels under orthogonal polarization…
Recent years have witnessed an extraordinary spurt in attention toward the wave manipulating strategies revealed by coding metasurfaces as they build up a bridge between the physical and digital worlds. Newly, it has been shown that when two different coding patterns responsible for doing separate missions are added together based on the superposition theorem, the mixed coding pattern will perform both missions at the same time. In this paper, via a semi-analytical procedure, we demonstrate that such a theorem is not necessarily valid for all possible functionalities with considering phase-onl…
Wireless communication has become a standard solution to address ever-increasing demands for information transfer in our modern society. Conventional systems work in an active way in the sense that an active carrier signal is mandatorily required to transfer information from Alice to Bob. Especially in the era of 5G6G and with the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), an exponential growth of users and connectivity confronts conventional systems with important challenges including limited spectrum resources, information security, energy consumption and cost efficiency. Here, we introduce the…
Programmable metasurfaces for future photonic artificial intelligence
Colorado School of Mines（科罗拉多矿业学院）；Université Côte d’Azur（蔚蓝海岸大学）；LAAS, Université de Toulouse（图卢兹大学LAAS实验室）；Université de Rennes（雷恩大学）；Department of Physics, Colorado School of Mines（科罗拉多矿业学院物理系）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Boston University（波士顿大学电气与计算机工程系）
As the bridge between the analog world and digital computers, analog-to-digital converters are generally used in modern information systems such as radar, surveillance, and communications. For the configuration of analog-to-digital converters in future high-frequency broadband systems, we introduce a revolutionary architecture that adopts deep learning technology to overcome tradeoffs between bandwidth, sampling rate, and accuracy. A photonic front-end provides broadband capability for direct sampling and speed multiplication. Trained deep neural networks learn the patterns of system defects, …
Neuromorphic photonics has recently emerged as a promising hardware accelerator, with significant potential speed and energy advantages over digital electronics, for machine learning algorithms such as neural networks of various types. Integrated photonic networks are particularly powerful in performing analog computing of matrix-vector multiplication (MVM) as they afford unparalleled speed and bandwidth density for data transmission. Incorporating nonvolatile phase-change materials in integrated photonic devices enables indispensable programming and in-memory computing capabilities for on-chi…
Optical prisms are made of glass and map temporal frequencies into spatial frequencies by decomposing incident white light into its constituent colors and refract them into different directions. Conventional prisms suffer from their volumetric bulky and heavy structure and their material parameters are dictated by the Lorentz reciprocity theorem. Considering various applications of prisms in wave engineering and their growing applications in the invisible spectrum and antenna applications, there is a demand for compact apparatuses that are capable of providing prism functionality in a reconfig…
